Jüri Reinvere

Jüri Reinvere. In Ticino , Switzerland (2011)

Jüri Reinvere (born December 2, 1971 in Tallinn ) is an Estonian composer, poet and essayist who has lived in Germany since 2005 . His music often uses his own poems, in whose symbolically complex language his own experiences of a cosmopolitan life have flowed. The stylistic diversity of his art goes hand in hand with close psychological observation and subterranean theological allusions.

Life

Jüri Reinvere grew up in the Estonian capital Tallinn. He attended the Tallinn Music High School ( Tallinna Muusikakeskkool ) from 1979 to 1990 . His first teacher in composition was Lepo Sumera . The piano training there took him to concert maturity, which later enabled him to work as a pianist and organist.

At that time, life in the Estonian SSR was marked by strong pressure to Russification . This did not affect Reinvere's openness to Russian culture , which he was familiar with from an early age.

From 1990 to 1992 Reinvere studied composition at the Fryderyk Chopin Music Academy in Warsaw . From 1992 to 2005 he lived in Finland . From 1994 he began studying composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki , accompanied by studies in theology, which he completed in 2004 with Veli-Matti Puumala and Tapio Nevanlinna . He also worked as an organist in the Kreuzkirche in Lahti , as a radio essayist for Finnish and Estonian broadcasters, occasionally wrote scripts for documentaries and worked as a producer on television.

In 1993 he met the Estonian-Swedish pianist and writer Käbi Laretei , whom Reinvere describes as his most important mentor. For a decade and a half he was in close contact with her and her former husband, the Swedish film and theater director Ingmar Bergman . Bergman introduced Reinvere to the tradition of Northern European drama by Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg as well as to the psychological work through of dramatic characters.

It was Laretei and Bergman who encouraged Reinvere to write literary works. The first prose was soon followed by his own poetry in English. This work was a prerequisite for Reinvere writing the libretti for his operas himself: Puhdistus in Finnish, Peer Gynt in German.

In 2000 he won the International Rostrum of Composers , the composition prize of the International Music Council of UNESCO , and was awarded again by the same committee in 2006. From 2000 to 2001 he was one of the scholarship holders of the Berlin Academy of the Arts . Reinvere is now a Finnish citizen. In 2005 he moved to Berlin and has lived in Frankfurt am Main since 2017 .

Create

Reinveres aesthetic knows two directions, a decided modernity with all tonal rigors and at the same time an unbroken courage for romanticism , which is why his music can sound very different. His major works, especially the operas, mediate between the two directions. They hold on to a psychological understanding of the drama, but expand the means of representation beyond the previous tradition. Reinvere often combines advanced sound production methods with classical narrative structures in his music. The rigorous working through of the work is accompanied by an opening up of content for other arts, for questions of theology, politics, general history and everyday life. However, the emphasis is on the immediate sensual presence of art.

Stage works: ballets and operas

In 2000 and 2001 Reinvere worked for the first time in Germany, especially with the choreographer Michaela Fünfhausen . The ballets Dialog I , Air-Water-Earth-Fire-Air or his radio opera On the other hand , structural thinking, as it was trained at the Sibelius Academy, leads together with influences of sound art, partly with recourse to electronically processed Nature sounds.

Ten years after the ballets worked Reinvere the novel Puhdistus of Sofi Oksanen to a libretto by: It was Reinveres first dramatic work as a poet and at the same time a political work whose importance was registered internationally. The world premiere took place on November 29, 2014. The opera sparked great media coverage across Europe, on the one hand because of its connotations with the assassination attempt by Anders Breivik , on the other hand because it addresses topics such as euthanasia and Western cultural fatigue.

Peer Gynt was commissioned for Den Norske Opera & Ballet Oslo under the artistic director Per Boye Hansen . Following the drama by Henrik Ibsen, which became a national symbol of Norway through the music of Edvard Grieg , Reinvere asks what national symbols mean today. At the same time he puts the story in the context of a theology of grace following Søren Kierkegaard . The world premiere took place on November 29, 2014. Reinvere received the Estonian State Prize for Peer Gynt in February 2015 .

Works based on their own lyrics

Since time (2005) for solo flute and speaker, Reinvere's non-theatrical works have often followed their own texts. In his poetry, there are predominantly free verses, but also complex meters and rhyme forms. His language works with multi-layered symbols and allusions to literary history, especially in a number of poems that follow authors of English Romanticism. So refers Norilsk , the Daffodils (for orchestra and speaker) on William Wordsworth , The Empire of May (for chamber ensemble and voice) on John Keats or The Arrival at the Ligurian Sea (for solo flute and chamber ensemble) on Percy Bysshe Shelley .

His Requiem from 2009 (for chamber choir, solo flute and speaker) deals with dying in today's world. Although Reinvere does not resort to religious concepts and forms, his Requiem remains open to a meaning of death in the Christian faith. The cycle Four Quartets combines own poems with string quartets and follows the work of the same name by TS Eliot . Like him, Reinvere is also concerned with turning specific places of life into symbols of human existence. In the tape playback of the first of the Four Quartets , Reinvere uses original documents from the maternity ward of the Central Hospital in Tallinn.

Other works

In Reinvere's other works, one often finds the crossing of genre boundaries and the crossing of different techniques, for example the processing of documentary material and aesthetically composed music through the means of musique concrète . His Livionian Lament from 2003, for example, uses sound recordings from the Livonian coast and recalls the extinction of the long-marginalized Livonian language . In the early double quartet with solo piano from 1994 there are still clear tonal references. In later works such tonal conceptions are still present, but less obvious. Reinvere often manages completely without tonal ties and relies on instrumental, spoken and vowel sounds that are closer to the noise than the precisely defined pitch. The clearly worked out textures are used according to a classical understanding of polyphony . The dramaturgically designed time makes it possible to build up listening expectations as well as confronting the listener with the unpredictable.

Essays

In his essay writing , the verbal and non-verbal transmission of thoughts and feelings plays a role as well as the manipulation or even destruction of cultural memory. These topics primarily reflect the own biography and the life of Reinveres ancestors in Estonia, but also expand their field of view to all of Europe and the USA. Reinvere, shaped by his experiences in Finnish parishes and in cities such as Berlin , Moscow , London , Florence and Warsaw also examines phenomena such as consolation, grace or beauty that are bestowed on people without being made by people. The proximity of dirt and sublimity, a theme also in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's literature , appears in Reinvere's essays as well as in his poetry.

As a commentator on current issues, he has occasionally been in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung since December 2013 . He fundamentally doubted that Western strategies would be helpful for improving the situation of sexual minorities in Russia. In addition, Reinvere attributed the fears in the Baltic states of Russian interventions after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to unresolved experiences in 1939/40 and the period after 1990. Recently, his articles for the FAZ have dealt more and more with the strategies of Soviet and post-Soviet dissidentism in the interplay between domestic political conflicts and Western attention. He has been a regular columnist for the Finnish music magazine RondoClassic since 2015, and since 2016 he has also devoted himself to cultural-analytical and political questions in the Estonian weekly Sirp and the daily Postimees . At the beginning of 2017 he was honored with the “Enn Soosaar Prize” for ethical essay writing in Tallinn for his texts in Sirp .

Musical works (selection)

• Peer Gynt, opera based on the play of the same name by Henrik Ibsen (2014)
• Puhdistus (Eng. Purgatory ) based on the novel of the same name by Sofi Oksanen (opera, 2012)
• Requiem (for solo flute and male voices, with video installation, 2009)
• Norilsk, the Daffodils (for orchestra and readers, 2012)
• Songs in the fading light. Five poems for soprano and orchestra (2016)
• Double Concerto for two flutes, string orchestra and percussion (2016)
• Four Quartets I – III (for string quartet and reader, 2012–2016)
• Frost at Midnight (for bass flute and choir, 2008)
• The Empire of May (for chamber ensemble, 2010)
• Written in the Sand (for orchestra, 2001)
• Air-Water-Earth-Fire-Air (music for Michaela Fünfhausen's dance performance Die gefiederte Schlange, 2003)
• Double quartet (with piano solo, 1994)
• Northwest Bow (for chamber music ensemble, 1998)
• On the other side (Radio-Oper, 2003)
• Livonian Lament (tape, 2003)
• time (for solo flute and electronics, with video installation, 2005)
• Causerie des confiseurs. Miniatures for eight pianos for sixteen hands (2016)

Discography

• a second ... a century (2009)
• Requiem (2010, CD + DVD)

Web links

• Official website (English)
• Sofi Oksanen on Jüri Reinvere (English)
• Complete list of works ( Eesti Muusika Infokeskus )
• Jüri Reinvere on YouTube and Soundcloud

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g} http://www.reinvere.de/re71aen.htm
2. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/kultur/jueri-reinvere-so-flirrt-musik-vor-ihrer-geburt,10809150,24030138.html
3. ↑ http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2350481/?ref_=fn_al_nm_1
4. ↑ http://reinvere.de/pdf/Second_Century_CD.pdf
5. ↑ ^{a b c} http://www.emic.ee/?sisu=heliloojad&mid=58&id=75&lang=eng&action=view&method=teosed#2878
6. ↑ ^{a b c} www.purgeopera.wordpress.com
7. ↑ http://www.emic.ee/estonian-composers-toivo-tulev-and-juri-reinvere-successful-at-the-2006-rostrum-in-paris
8. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
9. ↑ http://maaleht.delfi.ee/news/lehelood/koik/kabi-laretei-vottis-eluulesandeks-mitte-kunagi-kibestuda-see-lasi-tal-olla-vaba?id=78840204
10. ↑ http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/12130fce-8d2d-11e1-8b49-00144feab49a.html
11. ↑ https://soundcloud.com/reinvere/luft-wasser-erde-feuer-luft
12. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
13. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from October 31, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
14. ↑ http://www.ooppera.fi/ohjelmisto/puhdistus_%282012%29/844
15. ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
16. ↑ http://www.kul.ee/et/kultuuripreemiate-laureaadid
17. ↑ http://reinvere.de/pdf/FourQuartetsI.pdf
18. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyXYY8veMd8
19. ↑ http://www.ts.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/1074342824/Raiskattu+etela+naapuri+raapii+pois+neuvostokertomusta+historiastaan
20. ↑ http://reinvere.de/pdf/Brahms.pdf
21. ↑ http://fazarchiv.faz.net/?q=Reinvere&search_in=q&timePeriod=timeFilter&timeFilter=&DT_from=&DT_to=&KO=&crxdefs=&NN=&CO=&CN=&BC=&submit=Search=Suchen&sext=oggleosorting=Search=Suchen&sext=0&maxHits=n#&sext=0&maxHits=n hitlist
22. ↑ http://sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/c5-muusika/auhind-juri-reinvere-tahendus-enn-soosaare-eetilise-esseistika-auhinna-saajana/
23. ↑ ^{a b} http://www.emic.ee/?sisu=heliloojad&mid=58&id=75&lang=eng&action=view&method=diskograafia